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I should explain, then, that Tish has retained the old homestead in the country, renting it to a reliable family. And that it has been our annual custom to go there for chestnuts each autumn. On the Sunday following Charlie Sands’ visit, therefore, while Aggie and I were having dinner with Tish, I suggested that we make our annual pilgrimage the following day.

“What pilgrimage?” Tish demanded. She was at that time interested in seeing if a table could be set for thirty-five cents a day per person, and the meal was largely beans.

“For chestnuts,” I explained.

“I don’t think I’ll go this year,” Tish observed, not looking at either of us. “I’m not a young woman, and climbing a chestnut tree requires youth.”

“You could get the farmer’s boy,” Aggie suggested, hopefully. Aggie is a creature of habit, and clings hard to the past.

“The farmer is not there any more.”

We stared at her in amazement, but she was helping herself to boiled dandelion at the time, and made no further explanation.

“Why, Tish!” Aggie exclaimed.

“Aggie,” she observed, severely, “if you would only remember that the world is hungry, you would eat your crusts.”

“I ate crusts for twenty years,” said Aggie, “because I’d been raised to believe they would make my hair curl. But I’ve come to a time of life when my digestion means more to me than my looks. And since I’ve had the trouble with my teeth—-“

“Teeth or no teeth,” said Tish, firmly, “eating crusts is a patriotic duty, Aggie.”

She was clearly disinclined to explain about the farm, but on being pressed said she had sent the tenants away because they kept pigs, which was absurd and she knew it.

“Isn’t keeping pigs a patriotic duty?” Aggie demanded, glancing at me across the table. But Tish ignored the question.

“What about the church?” I asked.

Tish has always given the farm money to missions, and is therefore Honorary President of the Missionary Society. She did not reply immediately as she was pouring milk over her cornstarch at the time, but Hannah, her maid, spoke up rather bitterly.

“If we give the heathen what we save on the table, Miss Lizzie,” she said, “I guess they’ll do pretty well. I’m that fed up with beans that my digestion is all upset. I have to take baking soda after my meals, regular.”

Tish looked up at her sharply.

“Entire armies fight on beans,” she said

“Yes’m,” said Hannah. “I’d fight on ’em too. That’s the way they make me feel. And if a German bayonet is any worse than the colic I get—-“

“Leave the room,” said Tish, in a furious voice, and finished her cornstarch in silence.

But she is a just woman, and although firm in her manner, she is naturally kind. After dinner, seeing that Aggie was genuinely disappointed about the excursion to the farm, she relented and observed that we would go to the farm as usual.

“After all,” she said, “chestnuts are nourishing, and might take the place of potatoes in a pinch.”

Here we heard a hollow groan from the pantry, but on Tish demanding its reason Hannah said, meekly enough, that she had knocked her crazy bone, and Tish, with her usual magnanimity, did not pursue the subject.

There was a heavy frost that night, and two days later Tish called me up and fixed the following day for the visit to the farm. On looking back, I am inclined to think that her usual enthusiasm was absent, but we suspected nothing. She said that Hannah would put up the luncheon, and that she had looked up the food value of chestnuts and that it was enormous. She particularly requested that Aggie should not bake a cake for the picnic, as has been her custom.

“Cakes,” she said, “are a reckless extravagance. In butter, eggs and flour a single chocolate layer cake could support three men at the front for two days, Lizzie,” she said.

I repeated this to Aggie, and she was rather resentful. Aggie, I regret to say, has rather a weakness for good food.